If you've lived off Hope Road or driven Route 537 through the old Army base any time in the last few years, you've had some version of this conversation with a neighbor: "Did you hear what's finally happening at Fort Monmouth?" The honest answer is that several different things are happening, on separate schedules, run by separate organizations, and at least one of the projects everyone assumes is a Tinton Falls story is actually happening in the next town over.
Here's where things actually stand this month, stripped of the rumor mill:
- Bell Works Fort Monmouth, the former Commvault headquarters off Hope Road, is close to finished and already 88 percent leased.
- The Vogel Medical Campus cancer center, going up across from the municipal building, is targeting completion this December.
- The Tinton Avenue retail center near Borough Hall is real again after a decade of delay, but it isn't due until March 2030.
- Netflix Studios, the project most people mean when they bring up Fort Monmouth at all, is sited in Oceanport, not Tinton Falls.
None of these four run on the same clock. Knowing which one you mean changes what you should expect to see change on your own street this year versus what you're watching unfold four towns away.
Three Tinton Falls Projects, One Word
Fort Monmouth is 1,127 acres spread across Tinton Falls, Eatontown, and Oceanport, closed as an active Army installation in 2011. Since then, the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority has managed its reuse, and by its own count nearly 86 percent of the property's parcels are now under contract or already redeveloped. That number sounds like a finish line. It isn't one. It's a blended average across three municipalities, and the pace inside Tinton Falls' own slice of the base looks nothing like the pace in Oceanport or Eatontown.
The One That's Basically Done
According to the Two River Times, Bell Works Fort Monmouth sits at 1 Commvault Way, in the 276,900-square-foot building Commvault built as its global headquarters in 2014. Inspired by Somerset Development, the company behind Bell Works Holmdel, bought the property in early 2025 and has been converting it into what it calls a "metroburb," a mixed-use building blending office space, dining, retail, and shared community space under one roof. As of this spring the project was 88 percent leased.
Commvault didn't leave. The cybersecurity company is staying on as a tenant, holding roughly 75,000 square feet of the building it once owned outright.
The tenant getting the most attention locally is Jersey Mike's Subs, which relocated its corporate headquarters to the Tinton Falls site from Manasquan. Ralph Zucker, CEO of Inspired by Somerset Development, framed the move as validation of the whole model in comments to the Two River Times:
"We are thrilled to welcome a homegrown brand of this caliber to Bell Works Fort Monmouth."
A retail component is planned inside the building too, though no opening date has been set. Of the three active projects, this is the one where a resident driving past today sees something closest to a finished building rather than a construction fence.
The One With a December Deadline
Across from the Tinton Falls municipal complex and the Patriots Square residential development, the Robert Wood Johnson Barnabas Health Vogel Medical Campus is going up at Pearl Harbor Avenue and Corregidor Road. According to the Two River Times, the first building, a 138,000-square-foot cancer center and ambulatory care pavilion housing surgery, oncology, diagnostic imaging, radiation, and specialty physician offices, is expected to be complete this December, about three months from now.
FMERA unanimously approved a second phase, known as Phase 2a, on August 27, 2025, adding an acute care hospital, a clinical support building, a medical office building, a utility plant, and a parking facility. A Two River Times report from late August 2026 describes that 252-bed acute care hospital as now under construction, so the approvals cleared and ground broke sometime in the past year. Phase 1 alone is projected to create more than 300 jobs, with that number potentially climbing toward 1,000 once Phase 2a is built out. The full hospital itself isn't expected to open until 2032, which means the cancer center arriving this winter is really the first of two very different milestones on the same campus, six years apart.
The One That's Still Mostly a Rendering
The retail center planned along Tinton Avenue, directly across from Borough Hall, has the longest and most stalled history of the three. The Two River Times reported that FMERA entered into a redevelopment agreement with US Home Corporation, a Lennar subsidiary, back in 2015, covering nearly 52 acres of dual residential and commercial space in the Tinton Falls Reuse Area, close to Monmouth Regional High School. Lennar told FMERA in a July 2026 letter that pandemic disruption and a lack of marketability, given how long neighboring parcels sat undeveloped, had held the retail phase back for years.
That's changing now largely because of the other two projects. With the RWJBarnabas campus under construction nearby and the Bell Works building filling up, Lennar says there's renewed interest in the site and it's prepared to move forward with construction. Sarah Giberson, FMERA's director of Real Estate Development and Marketing, put the expected completion at March 31, 2030. That's a little over three years after the cancer center's December deadline; the full hospital, by contrast, isn't expected to open until 2032. That contrast shows how differently these three projects are paced, even though they sit within a mile of each other.
The One Everyone Actually Means Isn't Here
Ask most people in Monmouth County what's happening at Fort Monmouth and Netflix comes up first. The company has committed close to a billion dollars to build Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth on a 292-acre parcel, with 12 soundstages totaling nearly 500,000 square feet, which would make it Netflix's second-largest production facility in the country. Phase one is expected to open in 2027, with full completion by the end of 2028.
That project sits in Oceanport. It's part of the same 1,127-acre former base and it will absolutely shape the surrounding region, drawing workers, vendors, and demand for housing and retail across Monmouth County, but the soundstages themselves are not rising inside Tinton Falls borders. If you've been waiting to see cranes for the studio project from your own backyard, you're watching the wrong section of the fence line.
What This Means If You Live Here
Put the four pieces side by side and the picture is less "the base is finally happening" and more "four different clocks are running, and three of them are actually yours." Bell Works is the one you can walk into now. The cancer center is the one you'll watch finish this winter, with the much bigger hospital still years off. The Tinton Avenue town center is the one that will sit behind a fence through most of the rest of this decade. And Netflix is the one you'll hear about constantly, correctly, as a regional story that belongs to Oceanport's stretch of the same old base.
None of that requires you to do anything. But if you've been guessing at which building is which, or wondering why some of this seems stalled while other parts seem to be moving fast, the answer isn't confusion on your part. It's four separate projects that happen to share one very large, very old address.
If you're watching this corner of Tinton Falls change and wondering what it might mean down the road, whether you're thinking about your own home's value or just want a straight answer from someone who actually tracks this stuff, Samantha Vallone Verway is always glad to talk it through. Let's Get You Home.
